Implementing the material footprint to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 12
Currently, there is no reporting facility that provides comprehensive and relevant information on countries’ material footprints. The recently published paper, Implementing the Material Footprint to measure progress towards SDGs 8 and 12, presents a new collaborative research platform, based on multi-regional input–output analysis, that enables countries to regularly produce, update and report detailed global material footprint accounts and track progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8.4 and 12.2.
Sustainable development is reliant on decoupling economic growth from resource use. Nature Sustainability has published a new paper authored by colleagues at the University of Sydney and CSIRO together with SCP-HAT leading partner University of Vienna and several others, including International Resource Panel (IRP) and members of the United Nations Environment Programme that focuses on the material footprint indicator that measures material use across global supply-chain networks linking production and consumption. As a result, it has been used as an indicator for two Sustainable Development Goals: 8.4 ‘resource efficiency improvements’ and 12.2 ‘sustainable management of natural resources’.
The research shows that the global material footprint has quadrupled since 1970, driven predominantly by emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific region, but with an indication of plateauing since 2014. In addition, the paper outlines how capital investments’ increasing dominate over household consumption is the main driver of the growing global material footprint. Current trends depict absolute decoupling is unlikely to occur over the next few decades. However, the new collaborative research platform allows us to elevate the material footprint to Tier I status in the SDG indicator framework and eventually to expand application of the platform to other environmental footprint indicators.
Read the article here and learn more about SDG12 here.
Lenzen M, Geschke A, West J, Fry J, Malik A, Giljum S, Milà i Canals L, Piñero P, Lutter S, Wiedmann T, Li M, Sevenster M, Nansai K, Potočnik J, Teixeira I, Van Voore M and Schandl H (2021) Implementing the Material Footprint to measure progress towards SDGs 8 and 12 Nature Sustainability (2021) DOI:10.1038/s41893-021-00811-6
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